Physical therapy is a large profession with a large toolbox of treatments and interventions. Some of these common interventions include hands-on manual therapy, specific strengthening exercises, stretches, and re-learning how to do activities of daily living and return to sport specific training. If you’ve experienced physical therapy in the past, you probably have experienced some of these interventions and treatments. However, in my years as a physical therapist working for various settings and locations, there’s a critical piece that’s often missing in a patient’s treatment: patient education.
Patient education is often a severely undervalued aspect of a patient’s treatment. With many of my current patients, I’ve asked them what their experience has been like in the past with other companies. The vast majority of them do not know or understand what has been happening to them, what the purpose is of their treatment, or even what a normal time-frame for injury-resolution with treatment is like. Most of them have told me that they’re almost blindly following along with whatever their treatment dictates, but with no understanding of anything that’s going on. Some haven’t even been told exactly what their injury is!
Here’s one reason why that is important: by not understanding what your injury is or what’s causing it, you’re very likely going to keep doing the activities or perform the repetitive motion that is causing the injury in the first place. It’s very likely that you will keep injuring yourself and not give your body a chance to heal! This has a huge impact on your recovery!
Another reason patient education is such an important piece of recovery is that it empowers the patient. Patients are also much more likely to follow through with a home exercise program if they actually understand how and why it helps them. Physical therapy isn’t a magic bullet, it’s a way of guiding the body through it’s natural healing processes to ensure that optimal motion and strength are restored and allow for normal function. This does take time, but understanding that allows the patient to adhere to the treatment plan and not be discouraged when things aren’t instantaneously better! By working on your body with specific manual therapies, exercises, and stretches, it will gradually improve and eventually reach and even surpass where you want it to be!
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